No To Business Votes, Yes To Democracy!

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POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

It’s time to grab back the city from corporate interests and rebuild the Fortune Playhouse – not literally but in our imaginations; so that Finsbury, Cripplegate and the rest of EC1 becomes a place of play and creativity, somewhere that nourishes our community!

Judith Pleasance

He may not have been to Eton or have a great grandfather and grandfather who’d been Lord Mayors of London like William Russell, but Tim Hailes is another perfect candidate for top office as far as the City of London establishment is concerned. Hailes has worked for J P Morgan since 1999 where he is a Managing Director & Associate General Counsel in the Legal Department. He’s also a liveryman, a freemason (most Lord Mayor’s belong to this men only club) and no longer a Tory student activist (he was as a young man). Since conservatives in the City stand as independents, and not all of them want to overtly display any political colours, those who don’t belong to the Tory party – even if they once did – can group around The Royal Society of St George. Timothy Russell Hailes, alongside quite a number of his fellow City councilors, is a member of this ‘minor English institution’.

Rather than having an annual Sheep Run, we think it would be much better to have a one off Alderman Crawl. For this we propose that the Mayor of London, his Aldermen and all the common councillors from the business vote wards, are dressed in rags and made to crawl on their hands and knees across London Bridge from the City into Southwark. Once they are south of the river we don’t want them to come back, and trust that concerned citizens will emerge from their flats to drive them all the way out of London; perhaps to somewhere as far away as Dover.

The City of London has an entirely different system of local government to the rest of the UK; and one that is completely undemocratic. This is unfair to the residents of the borough and requires immediate rectification. The decision of the Corporation’s Planning Committee to approve the demolition of the architecturally significant Bernard Morgan House, and to allow Taylor Wimpey to build an over-scaled luxury apartment block on the site is indicative of all that’s wrong with this council. We have addressed potential conflict of interest issues and the vote rigging implications of this decision elsewhere. What we wish to underline here is that neither the Planning Committee nor the council has a mandate from local people and therefore their decisions are illegitimate. The City of London is the only place in the UK to retain the business vote, and there are roughly twice as many of these as residential votes. The ward boundaries and Alderman system also favour big business over people.

We’re fairly sure we’ve identified the ten people who voted against Taylor Wimpey’s Gerrymander Mansions development, which leaves those who either didn’t vote or voted in favour of it. So here is some background business and political information about three members of the Planning Committee who we suspect didn’t vote against the application. There is a a barrister, an IT professional, and a one time political researcher for a notorious right-wing Tory MP: Emma Edhem, Judith Pleasance and Rehana Ameer.